Friday 31 August 2012 19.05 EDT
First published on Friday 31 August 2012 19.05 EDT

Somewhere between the Ryanair redeyes, the Class As and the promotional T-shirts from record labels, dance music and style lost each other on the way to the club. When you see Ricardo Villalobos with his hair plastered to his sunglasses at 10am, or Addison Groove's pork pie hat gamely clinging to his head, the effect is one of mild nausea. So when Matthew Dear plays London's Boiler Room club night, with everyone else's clothing lumpen and translucent with sweat, it's a pleasure to see him imperious in an elegantly rumpled white collared shirt and gothic Teddy Boy hair. "I like to wear well-tailored suits," he says. "It's a hobby and passion of mine, and I think the stage is the perfect time to flex those desires, that muscle."

He's flexing it again in a quilted number when we meet in a hotel bar to talk about his new album Beams. Cherubic even at 33, Dear is quick to smile, and folds himself in and out of chairs with origami poise. His music matches his look, blending the clean lines of electro and techno with the scuffed edges of songcraft and his heavily multitracked voice. Along with a small number of peers (Sasu Ripatti, Dan Snaith), Dear has the rare ability to make music that's simultaneously for the ears and for the rest of the body.

After growing up in Texas surrounded by his older brother's New Order and Erasure records, followed by a short spell in Michigan and the usual moment of enlightenment at a warehouse rave, Dear started producing tracks around the turn of the century. Various aliases quickly cropped up, the most successful being Audion, his moniker for machine-tooled techno – his track Mouth To Mouth became ubiquitous in 2006 thanks to its throbbing clouds of noise and irresistible two-note bassline. But always, alongside these pure dancefloor tracks, would be albums of songs under his own name – his previous, Black City, a melancholy, claustrophobic reflection on the Big Apple. "New York City is a black hole, for this perspective," he says. "Black City was being sucked into the black hole, and Beams is the tail of light shooting out the other side. New York is a living machine, it can chew you up and spit you out very easily – Beams is realising your place within the machine."

The result is an album that's funkier, looser and wittier. "I thought I'd write a little call to arms to everybody: let loose! Everything's a bit more amorphous in my life now, bubbly and gelatinous. I'm letting things ooze into different places. When you realise there's no clear path or answer, things just are."

Like David Byrne, Chaz Jankel and Jez Kerr, Dear is one of white funk's great declarers, raffishly making gnomic observations like a pitch-shifted James Mason.

Beams arrives at a time when dance music is having one of its periodic upticks in American popular culture. What does Dear make of it all? "I think it's phenomenal that all these people are getting into electronic music. I equate it to binge-drinking – they're taking in this music like they're drinking tons of alcohol, and they want it fast, they want it now, they want it intense. But do you continue binge-drinking until your late 20s? Probably not. You start saying, 'let's introduce some fine scotch'."

As well as the hedonistic tracks on Beams then, there are also single-malt moments like Temptation, a song that assesses his relationship with his wife of seven years. "It was expunging of the soul in that song: here I am, cut me with a sword, let me bleed, and I'll get back up and we'll move on."

So you're becoming vulnerable for your wife? "Yeah. Musicianship is a difficult journey, living far away, always being gone – there's this desire to be Don and Sherri, actually." Here he's referring to a single from his album Asa Breed (pictured above). "Don And Sherri was about two people living in the middle of America, trudging through life, going to Walmart, doing the normal things. I'll never be that. So with Temptation, it's the relinquishing of those fears. I'm a highly emotional human being. It's always creeping in: love, sex, and relationships make up the basis of my songs."

Where his music will head next is uncertain, particularly as he's left the city for the countryside of upstate

New York, where he's living on a farm. "I wanted land, freedom, quietness. I'll see an average of eight people a day, versus seeing 800 [in New York] – they're replaced by the bunny rabbits that come in my yard and eat clovers, there's deer that walk across my backyard, there's black bears in the neighbourhood, wild turkeys everywhere in the street. Those are my new friends!"

Is he going to go all Americana? "Banjos and kick drums?" he laughs. "No, the good news is I can get as loud as I want there. I can crank it and make really driving electronic music, and not worry about my neighbours complaining."

He says he wants to make another Audion album, but not in between other things ("I'm not going to treat techno as this bastard little child that I tend to now and then"), and that he wants to turn his lyrical focus outward: "My life is what I sing about, but it is admittedly very, very narcissistic. I'd like to explore the outer, and get more creative. I have an anthropology degree – maybe this is where it's all coming from."

Then there's his live band with a new, larger lineup, and Dear front and centre. "I didn't want to force a fake ego, or invent someone I wasn't just to make it work on stage," he says. "It's realising you have the ability to be a bit of a superhero on stage, and that's your time to be someone else, and project outwardly." So "Matthew Dear" isn't a persona, but rather a magnified part of you?

"Exactly, it's pieces of me. Emotion, sadness, the lover in me – it's all four corners of feeling."